From Kerry Grens at The Scientist:
Researchers continue to fail in reproducing a new gene-editing technique called NgAgo, for Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, an endonuclease. In a report published last week (November 15) in Protein & Cell, scientists from the U.S. and China working independently found no evidence that NgAgo could manipulate DNA sequences.“Some of us have even sent visiting researchers to [Chunyu] Han’s laboratory but they were not allowed to perform genome editing experiments involving mammalian cells when they were there,” the authors, led by Shawn Burgess of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in their report. … More.
The publisher is said to be investigating.
The good news is that recent serious interest in replicability is making it harder to just stonewall investigations.
See also: Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky asks: Is the peer review system sustainable? They recommend paying reviewers for their time, fewer papers, and different forms of peer review, for example sites like PubPeer.com and PubMed Commons.
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